Liz Collins: Motherlode
RISD Museum, USA
July 19, 2025 – January 11, 2026

This summer, the RISD Museum will open the first U.S. survey of artist Liz Collins’ genre-defying work. For more than three decades, Collins has moved fluidly between the realms of fine art, fashion, and design, pushing material and technical boundaries to create works that evoke a depth of emotion, energy, and individual expression. The exhibition, titled Liz Collins: Motherlode, will feature more than 80 objects, capturing for the first time the full arc of Collins’ career from the 1980s to the present day. Motherlode includes important examples of her immersive textile installations and wallworks, intricate and monumental woven hangings, fashion, needlework, drawings, performance documentation, and ephemera. In keeping with the RISD Museum’s commitment to centring makers and broadening perspectives, the exhibition vividly showcases the trailblazing nature of Collins’ work as well as the artist’s deep commitment to illuminating Queer feminist creative practice and environmental activism.

The exhibition is curated by Kate Irvin, RISD Museum’s Department Head and Curator of Costume and Textiles, in close collaboration with the artist. Motherlode is accompanied by the first monograph on Collins’ work. The book offers new scholarship on the significance and influence of Collins’ career by industry leaders and those from her inner circle. Contributions include a lively conversation between the artist and art historian and critic Julia Bryan-Wilson and essays by Irvin, independent curator, writer, and historian Glenn Adamson, and writers, designers, and cultural thinkers Octavia Burgel, Zoe Latta, and Eileen Myles. The book, which is also titled Liz Collins: Motherlode, is being published by Hirmer Publishers and will be available in July 2025.

Motherlode follows Collins across her many shifts and evolutions in pursuit of her aesthetic and conceptual vision, from the success of her knit-focused label to her early forays into installation works, to her performances with knitting machines inspired in part by her time teaching at RISD, and through to her ongoing engagement with issues of personal and communal meaning across a vast array of media. Throughout every turn, Collins has sought new generative space for experimentation and maintained a keen sense of humor and mischief. As discussed in Irvin’s insightful introductory essay in the accompanying book, Collins has been the ever-changing trickster, stretching the possibilities of her materials and upending expectations of how her work should look, feel, and communicate to audiences.

This is especially evident in her deep engagement with yarn, fabric, and textiles. Her radical approach has firmly asserted the power of these elements to hold and convey meaning, dismantling notions of textiles as “lesser art.” Motherlode features a dynamic range of Collins’ textile works, including examples from her fashion label such as Lumberjack Goddess Dress (2005) and Samurai Coat (2001), wall pieces and installations like Euphoria II (2016), Veins-Darkness (2022), and Power Portal (2024), monumental woven hangings like Rainbow Mountain Weather (2024) and Zagreb Mountains (2022); and more intimate wall-works such as Specimens (2000/2017) and Worst Year Ever (2010/2017), among numerous others. The exhibition also includes seminal works on paper, including Ecstasy (2014-2016) and Atlas Matrix Variation 2 (2020), as well as ephemera and documentation from her Knitting Nation project, which through live performance-installations produced large-scale textiles that protested the Iraq War, examined the rainbow flag as a symbol of gay pride, and spoke to numerous other ideas and issues.

Inspired by a range of subjects and references, from personal emotional states to communal experiences, and to contemporary politics, Collins leverages the tactility of fibre to unravel, deconstruct, combine, reimagine and create anew the structures of our inner and outer lives. Through time, Collins’ practice has extended to fine needlework and drawing, which also factor strongly in Motherlode, as the exhibition courses through the incredible range of Collins’ oeuvre. The results are a depth of works that serve as intricate studies in materiality, the aesthetics of abstraction and optical illusion, and the power of art to evoke a deep humanness.

In keeping with Collins’ career-long commitment to instigating and celebrating Queer community and creativity, Motherlode will also include a salon-style exhibition of works by Queer artists curated by a group of RISD students in collaboration with Collins. The exhibition-within-the-exhibition will offer an immersive and inclusive social space, an environment meant to foster conversation and exchange. Developed in close partnership with the RISD Museum, the project reflects our commitment to co-creating spaces where multiple perspectives shape how stories are told. The students are exploring works from the museum’s collection and dozens of artists drawn from RISD alumni, students, faculty, and staff.

more. www.risdmuseum.com